Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, a network system, and a control method of the image forming apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there is a monitoring system that remotely monitors an operation state of a peripheral device such as an image forming apparatus. The following techniques are proposed as methods of updating firmware of an image forming apparatus under an environment of the monitoring system.
For example, a technique is proposed in which firmware is stored in a rewritable storage device such as a flash memory, and firmware is received through the Internet to rewrite the flash memory based on the received firmware to update the firmware.
In this case, a system is proposed in which the update is reserved from the monitoring system for remote monitoring, or whether there is latest applicable firmware is checked through access to a server triggered by operation by an operator in an image forming apparatus or through automatic access to the server.
A technique is also proposed in which when a plurality of programs depend on each other in the update of the programs, order information indicating the order of update is acquired, and the plurality of programs are updated according to the order information (for example, see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-60232).
However, there are the following problems in the system in which the image forming apparatus is triggered by the operation in the image forming apparatus to access the server to determine whether there is a firmware set including the latest firmware applicable to the image forming apparatus.
In such a system, a general operator is allowed to perform only collective update based on a specific set of firmware from the viewpoint of the security and the like. In that case, a set of installed firmware of previous versions is specified, and then a set of latest firmware for replacing the set is searched. To search the set of latest applicable firmware, a set of firmware of previous versions and a set of corresponding firmware of new versions are registered in a server, and information of current firmware of the image forming apparatus, such as an identifier and a version of the installed firmware, needs to be transmitted to the server.
When, for example, a service person updates part of the firmware through a dedicated service screen or the like, a combination of current versions of the firmware of the image forming apparatus may not be registered in the server. In this case, the set of latest applicable firmware cannot be searched even if the information of the firmware of the image forming apparatus is transmitted to the server, because the set of firmware of the versions is not registered in the server. Therefore, collective update of the set of firmware cannot be performed in this case.